


and leaves its scars behind

by loyaulte_me_lie



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Closure, F/M, Gen, Grief, Letters, Missing Scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:42:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29948100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loyaulte_me_lie/pseuds/loyaulte_me_lie
Summary: It is the second night when Will finds the letters /or/ throughout his exile, John Parry has been writing to his family.
Relationships: Elaine Parry/John Parry, John Parry & Will Parry
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	and leaves its scars behind

**Author's Note:**

> My brain came up with this zinger this morning before work, so...apologies? And thanks to Maris who has been listening to me scream about it all day! The title is from "Heart of Stone" from Six (The Musical), the epigraph from Maaza Mengiste's majestic, brutal book "The Shadow King", and I'm using TV canon because it fits the emotional beats of this better.
> 
> T/W: grief, death of a parent, brief mention of suicide.

> _"This is where all the light in the world has settled, she thinks. This is where it has been while she was struggling in such darkness."_
> 
> **\- Maaza Mengiste**

*****

**i.**

It is the second night and Will is sitting alone by his fire, numbly going through his father’s things. Balthamos is sulking - keeping watch, he’d insisted - in the treetops, and the night draws in close – all misty breath and the promise of monsters. Will tugs his father’s coat closer around his shoulders and continues to lay out everything that was in the bag. Most of it is practical: a compass, long-life food, matches, a lightweight water bottle, medicines in meticulously labelled pots and jars, a spare pair of warm socks. He tries to keep his mind clear, to not think about the man who’d touched these only days ago, to not think about the things he’d said:

_Look at you, you’re a warrior._

_Look at what you’ve become without me._

_I tried to make these worlds a better place for you._

_I’m sorry._

It’s nothing like what he thought meeting his father for the first time would be. It’s nothing like what he _wanted._ He swallows hard, tries to put his mind in the place it goes when he cuts between worlds. He tries to think of Lyra, to think of his purpose, to not think at all. He dips his hand back into the bag to make sure he’s got everything. His fingers meet something cold and hard and rectangular stuffed in the bottom corner – he pulls it out, distantly curious. It’s a battered tin, a rectangle with round edges that might have once been green. He examines it for a second, then pries the lid open carefully. He expects it to be more medicine or a tool, but he’s looking down at paper, at envelopes.

His heart catches painfully in his throat as he realises what he’s seeing. The box is full of letters.

There are several stacks, all bound with string and labelled. Will lifts each one out in turn. He can hear his heartbeat in his ears. The world has receded to nothing but his cold fingers and the flickering of firelight on old paper. The first stack is labelled _from Elaine, 2000/2004._ The second, _from Elaine, 2006._ The third, _to Elaine._ And the fourth…the bottom pile has his name on them in the same pinched, crabby handwriting. Will traces a finger over the ink, blinks hard. He puts the others back into the tin and closes the lid. He slides out the first letter – there are eleven – and opens the envelope.

_To my dearest Will, on your first birthday…_

The tears are storm-sudden and blinding. Will doubles over with the force of them, dropping the tin and sobbing because his father is _dead,_ and he’s never going to get the chance to know him. All of his childish dreams have come to absolutely nothing.

How could he have thought things would ever be different?

**ii.**

It takes until Svalbard to get his head around the fact that his father wrote a letter to him on each of his birthdays.

It’s not until Siberia that he actually musters the courage to read them.

**iii.**

The Siberian night is cold and dark and endless. Will was travelling for a while with a group of Nenets reindeer herders; they were kind, nomadic people who tolerated the silent ghost of a boy trailing in their footsteps for several hundred kilometres, who let him share their food and sleep in their tents in return for help wrangling their animals. Now, they’ve carried on east and Will and Balthamos have curved south, hit taiga forests thick with pines and cold air and undergrowth that doesn’t give way without a fight. Balthamos, never chatty before, has become completely withdrawn since Baruch died – he spends the days flying overhead and the nights hiding beyond the reach of the fire. Will, numb, bored, exhausted, finally swallows his fear and digs the tin out of the bag.

The first letter he has to force himself to read, word by word, inch by aching inch. Then, like a flood, he finds he can’t stop.

The letters are long, beautifully constructed, and Will reads each one several times before he moves onto the next. He learns that his father was more than a soldier, more than an explorer, more than any label anyone tried to assign to him. He learns his father was a man who said things like _the least you owe the world is an open mind_ and _bravery is an acquired skill, not an inherent trait_ and _don’t settle for fate unless you have a very good_ _reason to._ He learns his father was a man who collected stories and tales for a son he hadn’t seen in years just because he thought a four-year-old would like them. Slowly, he fills in the sketch of his father given by service records and photographs and his mother’s memories.

It’s more than he’d ever thought he’d get – this inky patchwork scrawl of a life. He doesn’t know why his father did it. Maybe guilt. Maybe fond memory. Either way, he’s strangely glad.

**iv.**

_…how does a person keep hoping? How? When every door is slammed in his face, when every question is shut down before it’s even finished being articulated, when…_

_Committing this to paper feels like the worst thing I could do to you, but…I’ve given up. Will, I’ve given up. I think I’ve been giving up for years, longer than I’d like to admit. But it’s been nearly twelve years. If there was a way, I’d have found it by now._

_See, this is one thing they don’t teach you, Will. Hope is poisonous. They say there’s no life without hope, but they’re wrong. Hope is agonising and awful, and I pray to whoever is listening that you never have to experience it like I have. May you never have to watch your hope dashed over and over again; may you never have to cling to its drowned, battered corpse praying that it will rise up and bear fruit. Because you’re nothing without it. Absolutely nothing._

_~~If I hadn’t had a family…~~ _

_I have to stop hoping or one day soon I’m going to pitch myself off the nearest cliff. There’s no fighting fate. I wish I’d seen it before._

_I don’t expect understanding or forgiveness._

_~~I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself.~~ _

**v.**

Will stops reading for a long time after that.

**vi.**

The bears have everything on the boat in hand, so there is little to do but sit and watch the world go by as they sail down the Amu Darya towards the mountains. After a few days, Will finds himself reaching for the tin again – he’d hidden it in his things after finding that awful last letter. He avoids the stack addressed to him, instead picks out the old ones Mum wrote to his father before he was born. He sits in the prow of the boat and pieces together the conversations with the letters he’d brought from Oxford too, reads his parents’ courtship from start to finish.

It’s strange. He’s always thought of Mum as fragile and delicate, thought she’d been built that way – that his father had been her protector – but he’s beginning to think that he was wrong.

One day, he is standing at the rail watching the grassland drift by with an early letter in his hand:

_…it’s alright for things to be unspeakable as well. Poets know better than maybe anyone that some things can’t be conveyed through words, and some things can’t ever be conveyed to another person at all. I hope you know that and know that it’s alright. And if you ever can or do want to speak them, I am here…_

After a while, he realises that Iorek has come up behind him and is standing a safe distance away, watching the landscape too. They stand in companionable silence whilst Will finishes reading and tucks it carefully back into its envelope. They stay in silence, listening to the lap of water against the hull. Eventually, he asks: “Iorek, did you ever know your parents?”

He’s not entirely sure if Iorek is even going to answer, but Iorek swings his head around to look at Will. His black eyes are very flat, devoid of emotion, but Will gets the sense that Iorek knows something is wrong, that he cares.

“Yes,” he says. “Why?”

“I…” Will doesn’t think he can articulate the reason, not in any meaningful way, so settles rather weakly on, “I’m curious.”

Iorek dips his head, assenting. “My father died when I was a cub. My mother took over the kingship. She was the one who sent me into exile.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Iorek huffs. “You humans never understand. She was my king before she was my mother. It was her duty.”

Will looks back at the letters folded in his hands, takes a deep shaky breath, the realisation like dawn spilling light into a dark and dim past. He’s always thought of his parents as a story before – his father the mythic hero, his mum as the fairytale princess in need of salvation. He’s never had cause to question it before.

“I think we forget our parents were people first,” he says, softly.

Iorek makes a low humming growl deep in the back of his throat but doesn’t reply. Will breathes in, and picks another letter, aching at his mother’s giddy, sprawling joy - at her blissful ignorance of everything that was to come.

**vii.**

The battle rages around them, but Will cannot move. The window is open behind him and he’s got Pan clutched tightly in his arms, can feel his own dæmon in Lyra’s. His father’s ghost stands before him, between him and the oncoming monsters. They’d acknowledged each other in the land of the dead, but nothing more. There hadn’t been time. There isn’t time now, not really, but Will knows that he’s never going to get another chance. This is one regret he’s not going to have.

“Thank you,” he says, not sure why it sounds so stilted. He doesn’t know what he’s thanking his father for – for taking the bullet, for the letters, for saving his dæmon and Pan. Then, the words tripping over themselves without any thought from his head, “I…I…you were wrong. I’m not a warrior.”

“I know,” his father says, reaches up and touches Will’s cheek with a ghostly hand. His eyes are very old and very sad. “I was wrong, and I’m sorry. You’re so much more than a warrior. You’re utterly magnificent. I couldn’t be prouder if I tried.”

“Really?” Will whispers. Tears burn at the back of his throat. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this.

“Yes, really. I’m sorry I can’t get to know you as you are.”

“I am too. I wish you could come with me.”

“I will be with you, Will,” his father says, gentle. His hand is still cold and ethereal against Will’s face. “I’ll be in the trees and the wind and the sunshine. I’ll be there when you need me and when you don’t. And I’ll always hear you when you call for me, ok?”

“Ok,” Will says.

“Tell Elaine that too. Tell her that I love her.”

“I will.” Then, hurriedly, “I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, Will,” his father says, steady and shining.

He presses a faint kiss to Will’s forehead, and then he’s gone, just like that, a silver mirage dissolving into dust and air. Will’s knees buckle, but suddenly Lyra is there with a shoulder under his arm, warm and steady and true, his dæmon cradled to her chest.

“Come on,” she says, “come on, Will, let’s go.”

**viii.**

“He loved me so much,” Will says into the silence. He and Lyra are curled up under trees and dusty golden sunlight, her head on his chest and her arms wrapped around him. They’ve been out here all day, talking and talking and talking. When they’d run out of words and breath, they’d lapsed into quiet, into just _being._ It’s the most at peace Will has ever felt in his entire life. He’d let himself drift away, and of course, his head had circled back to his parents. To his father. He hasn’t been letting himself near the thought for days, too raw from that last meeting, too brittle from everything he’s lost. But now, here, safe with Lyra…

Lyra lifts her head and props it on an elbow to look him in the face. “Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he?”

“I just…I’ve spent my whole life thinking that he didn’t. I didn’t realise it until now. I…I didn’t want to believe that he just left us, and I pretended that I didn’t, but I did think so. I’ve always thought so. But it really was an accident, and he really tried everything to get back and…and…”

He can’t finish, breathes once, twice, three times in an attempt to balance himself. Lyra puts her head back down against his heart and tightens her arms.

“I’m glad you know that now,” she says into his t-shirt. “So glad, Will. So very, very glad.”

**ix.**

He stands in his boxing teacher’s garden with the tin of letters in his hand. Mary and Mr Hanway are ‘making tea’ in the kitchen, though he knows it’s just an excuse. Not that he cares. He doesn’t care about anything right now apart from the fact his mother is on her knees in the grass at the end of the lawn, pruning flowers and humming to herself, lit up and whole and nothing like the terrified, barely-there woman he’d left. As if she senses eyes, she looks up.

“Will?” she breathes, dropping her shears and rising to her feet. “Will, is that you?”

“Yeah,” he says, stepping into the sunlight. “Hi. I’m home.”

“Oh,” Mum says faintly, and then she’s taking a step forward, and another and another and another, until she’s right in front of him. She wraps her arms around him and tugs him into a hug. He goes, willingly.

“I’m sorry,” he says into her hair, breathing in the smell of the herbal shampoo she’s always used, his voice catching in his throat. “Mum, I’m so sorry for leaving you, I’m so…”

“I knew you’d come back,” she says simply, her breath warm against his ear. After a long while, she lets go and takes his shoulders. She seems more lucid than he’s seen her in years, more settled, like being here has been good for her. Then, “my _god,_ Will, what happened to your hand?”

“It’s…a long story. And it’s fine, don’t worry, it’s healed.”

She gives him a deeply disbelieving look, and he sighs. “I promise I’ll tell you everything. But I just…first, I needed to…I saw Dad.”

She goes very, very still. “He’s alive?”

“Yes. Well. He got stranded in another world. That's why he went missing. He couldn't get back, but he tried really hard. He…he wrote to you. And me. But these are yours, look, here. I haven’t read them. I read the others but I didn’t read them.”

“Will, what are you not telling me?”

Will blinks hard, clenches his fists and digs his nails into his palms. The words burn like coals at the back of his mouth. He’s done all manner of awful, difficult things in the last six months but now he’s here he thinks there’s nothing worse than standing in front of your mother, getting ready to tell her that…

“He died,” he chokes out. “He died taking a bullet aimed at me."

Mum’s expression is something he hopes never to have to see again as long as he lives. She sways on her feet, closes her eyes. He reaches out to take her hand and she grips his fingers tightly, painfully.

“Oh, John, love,” she says. “that is the way you would have gone, isn’t it?”

The tears are running freely down her face and Will gives up on holding back his own tears. Kirjava, silent until now, winds around his ankles and then gets in between them and presses herself against Mum’s shins too. Will tugs Mum back into a hug and holds her close. She wraps her arms around his middle, cups the back of his head.

“He loved you till the end, Mum,” he says into her shoulder. “He was faithful till the end.”

“I know, love,” she says. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> To be noted as well - the bit of Elaine's letter here is from my other fic 'not without my muse' which is basically my ground-zero for how Elaine & John met and fell in love. Please come scream at me: @if-fortunate on Tumblr!!


End file.
